Free The Mortdecai Trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli Page A

interests of some of the Highest in the Land?’
    To my amazement it seemed to work. He nodded slowly, initialled the front of the file and sat back in his chair. Americans have some curious pockets of old-fashionedness. One could feel the atmosphere of the room relaxing; even the air conditioner seemed to have changed its note. I cocked an ear.
    ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I think that your wire recorder has run out of wire.’
    ‘Why, thank you,’ he said and pressed another button. The mammiferous secretary slithered in, changed the spool and slithered out again, giving me a small, hygienic smile en route. An English secretary would have sniffed.
    ‘Do you know Milton Krampf well?’ Blucher asked suddenly. Clearly, the ball game was still on.
    ‘Krampf?’ I said. ‘Krampf? Yes, to be sure, very good customer of mine. Hope to spend a few days with him. Very nice old sausage. Bit potty of course but he can afford to be, can’t he, ha ha.’
    ‘Well, no, Mr Mortdecai, I in fact was referring to Dr Milton Krampf III, Mr Milton Krampf Junior’s son.’
    ‘Ah, there you have me,’ I said truthfully, ‘never met any of the family.’
    ‘Really, Mr Mortdecai? Yet Dr Krampf is a well-known art historian, is he not?’
    ‘News to me. What’s his field supposed to be?’ The Colonel flipped through the file – perhaps it was the
Krampf
file after all.
    ‘He seems to have published numerous papers in American and Canadian journals,’ he said, ‘including “The Non-Image in Dérain’s Middle Period,” “Chromato-Spacial Relationships in Dufy,” “Léger and Counter-Symbolism” …’
    ‘Stop!’ I cried, squirming. ‘Enough. I could make up the rest of the titles myself. I know this sort of thing well, it has nothing to do with art history as I know it; my work lies with the Old Masters and I publish in the
Burlington Magazine
– I am quite a different sort of snob from this Krampf, our scholarly paths would never cross.’
    ‘I see.’
    He didn’t see at all but he would have died rather than admit it. We parted in the usual flurry of insincerities. He still looked young, but not quite as young as when I had come in. I walked home, musing again.
    Jock had a sauté of chicken livers ready for me but I had no stomach for the feast. Instead I chewed a banana and about a third of a bottle of gin. Then I had a little zizz, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep. A zizz, you know, is a very present help in trouble. With me, it takes the place of the kind, wise, tobacco-smelling, tweed-clad
English
father that other boys had when I was a schoolboy; the sort of father you could talk things over with during long tramps over the hills; who would gruffly tell you that ‘a chap can only do his best’ and that you ‘must play the man’ and then teach you to cast a trout-fly.
    My father wasn’t like that.
    Sleep has often taken the place of this mythical man for me: often I have woken up comforted and advised, my worries resolved, my duty clear.
    But this time I awoke unrefreshed and with no good news teeming in my brain. There was no comfortable feeling that a warm, tweedy arm had been about my shoulder, only the old gin-ache at the base of the skull and a vague taste of dog dung in the mouth.
    ‘Heigh-ho,’ I remember saying as I listened to the Alka-Seltzer fussing in its glass. I tried the effect of a clean shirt and a washed face; there was some slight improvement but various small nit-sized worries were still there. I have a dislike for coincidences and I
detest
clever young American colonels, especially when their uniforms do not quite fit them.
    I was rather a cheery, carefree chap in those days, always ready to welcome a little adversity just for the pleasure of dealing with it deftly. So I was worried at feeling worried, if you see what I mean. One should only have a sense of impending doom when one is constipated and I was not, as it happened.
    Jock handed me a stiff envelope